Lunar Adventures: exploring a little bit of everything

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Annoyance of Day™: Banner ads that talk

Advertising drives the internet.  I understand that, and can deal with it — even this humble little site has an ad on it here and there.  And with the rise of contextual advertising and niche marketing, I’ve even clicked on some ads because they were — get this — relevant, interesting, and presented a product I was interested in.

But then there are the run of the mill banner ads.  Ones that have very little or no relevance to the content and whose sole method of gathering attention is being annoying.  Previously, this meant garish colors, annoying Flash animations or animated GIFs.  But, for some reason — perhaps file size limitations, perhaps content providers refusing to break a certain threshold of annoyance — sound had been blissfully missing from the majority of banner ads.  You saw it every now and then, but it wasn’t that widespread.  (At least, it wasn’t that widespread at the sites I was visiting.)

But now there’s a series of banner ads pointing out that I’ve won an iPod or a computer or a boat or something.  I don’t actually remember.  Nothing new, really.  The same ad has been around forever in some incarnation or another (which means it must actually be effective, which makes me worry about the IQ of the human race).

But this ad has added voices, now.  Sometimes, a perky female reads the copy to me, telling me I’ve won.  Sometimes it’s a fresh-sounding male.  Either way, it’s annoying.  Very annoying.

So, I’m sitting here listening to some tunes and reading a website that will remain unnamed and unlinked because it carries this ad.  Then the perky female starts reading the ad out loud while I try to read some content.  The ad runs its course while I’m reading and find a link that I decide to follow.  I click the link, a new page loads, and the ad reloads.  Which means… guess what!  I may have won!  I repeat this process one more time before running away from the site with my speakers muted.

To recap: I click on the ad exactly zero times and leave the site and am very reluctant to go back.  Was it worth it, content provider?  I’m probably not the only reader thinking this.  Remember content providers — make sure the ads on your site won’t cost you readers.

Sat May 3rd, 2008 9:55 pm

Filed under Advertising & Marketing, Business